Friday, 30 January 2015

At present
only one military force is effectively combatting Islamic State (IS) on the
ground – the
Kurdish guerrilla fighting force known generically as the Peshmerga (“Those Who
Face Death”). For weeks, IS has been losing ground in northern Iraq to Iraqi Kurdish fighters; now they
are succumbing to Peshmerga troops in Syria. On
January 27 it
was announced that the Kurdish forces had “expelled all IS fighters
from Kobane and have full control of the town”. After more than four
months of intensive fighting, the Kurdish fighting force had chased IS out of
the strategically important town situated on the Syrian-Turkish border.

In fact
almost all of the recent victories over IS have been achieved by Kurdish
guerrillas, willing to fight where others have collapsed – like Iraq’s security
forces, with some million men under arms, which fled in the face of IS’s lightning
advance last summer. More to the point,
perhaps, the Peshmerga are the force with “boots on the ground”, unlike any of the
62-nation strong anti-IS coalition, established by President Obama. All of them promised, and many are providing,
financial, logistical, military and humanitarian assistance by the bucketful,
but not one fighting soldier on the ground, at least officially.

It is true that the Peshmerga’s
military successes might not have occurred so quickly, or so conclusively, without
the aid of substantial American support by way of air cover, training by US special
forces (and perhaps
something more than training, albeit unacknowledged) and the plentiful
provision of weapons. For example, prior
to the Kurds securing Kobane, US-led
coalition aircraft pounded IS positions 17 times in just 24 hours.
Nevertheless, the Kurdish guerrillas are the ones actually undertaking the
fighting, the victories are theirs to celebrate, and they deserve the
congratulations of all nations opposed to the brutal and inhumane IS
organization and its unacceptable ambitions for the future of the world.

How can the world repay these
doughty soldiers, fighting on humanity’s behalf?

The Kurds yearn for the restoration of what might
be called “Greater Kurdistan”. The Kurds
are an ethnic group some 30 million strong who inhabit a distinct
geographical area flanked by mountain ranges.
It was once referred to as Kurdistan. No such entity is depicted on current maps. What was once Kurdistan, together with all
its 30-plus million inhabitants, was carved up in the negotiations following
the First World War, which dismembered the old Ottoman empire. Following the treaty of Lausanne in 1923, the
territory that had been Kurdistan was divided up and allocated to the sovereign
states of Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria.
Kurds currently form the largest minority in Syria, while within Iraq,
following the downfall of Sadam Hussein, they have developed a near-autonomous
state across the north of the country which has taken the name Kurdistan.

Most Kurds, however, live within Turkey’s borders. They
comprise about 20% of Turkey's 77 million population and have long
been a pressing political problem for Turkey. In the 1980s an armed insurgencychallenged the Turkish state, which
responded with martial law. In
the subsequent, and on-going, conflict between Turkey and the Kurdish
independence movement, the PKK, more than 40,000 people have been killed. Which is the most obvious explanation for why
Turkey’s president, Rece Tayyip Erdogan, apparently preferred to see IS retain
control of Kobane rather than assist Kurdish fighters to recapture it, and sat
on his hands for months while the battle raged just over the Turkish border.

But the recapture of the town by the Kurds is precisely
what has happened, with the aid and support not only of the US, but of the 62
nations who oppose IS and are dedicated to its destruction. In short, Erdogan has been backing the wrong
horse – and not only Erdogan. World
opinion as a whole has not been noticeably supportive of the idea of Kurdish
independence in the past. Western policy
in Iraq has been to attempt to retain the disparate areas – Sunni, Shia and Kurd – in one unified state, rather than
permit the Kurds to transform their autonomous region into a sovereign entity.

One notable
exception has been Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. In a
speech delivered on June 29, 2014 at Tel Aviv University's Institute for National Security Studies, he declared that
Israel supports the transformation of autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan into an
independent Kurdish state. "We need to support the Kurdish aspiration for
independence,” he said. “They deserve it."

Following that lead, in August 2014 Senator
Conrad Burns urged the US government to support the Kurds in their
aspiration. “The people of Kurdistan
have been striving for independence and the right of self-government for
generations,” he wrote. “They have been close several times only to be struck
down by outside world powers. They have endured
atrocities and have paid the price for freedom. It is
therefore time that the United States took heed of these sacrifices and
fulfilled its moral obligation to support the people of Kurdistan and their
ambitions for freedom and national sovereignty.”

Britain’s traditional stance has been to back Kurdish
autonomy, but to oppose statehood. In
a recent editorial, the London Daily Telegraph asked whether that
would remain the UK’s position after IS was beaten. “Britain should be thinking not just about
how to defeat IS” it wrote, “but what might lie beyond.”

Meanwhile gallant Kurdish fighters are still putting
their lives on the line, combatting the dark forces that glory in violating accepted
standards of humane and decent behaviour in pursuit of their political and
religious aims. The Kurds deserve the grateful thanks of each one of the 62 nations that
have signed up to the anti-IS alliance.When
the final battle has been fought and won – or even in advance of that happy event – supporting the Kurds’ desire for an independent sovereign
state would be a suitable gesture of appreciation.Published in the Jerusalem Post on-line, 2 February 2015:http://www.jpost.com/Experts/The-Kurds-standard-bearers-for-humanity-389751Published in the Eurasia Review, 30 January 2015:http://www.eurasiareview.com/31012015-kurds-standard-bearers-humanity-oped/

Friday, 23 January 2015

There is no
disputing the fact that Hezbollah is entirely a creature of post-revolutionary
Iran – its stooge, if you will. Over
its thirty-year life Hezbollah has not only acted in concert with its sponsor
in initiating and carrying out multiple acts of terror across the world, but it
has also infiltrated itself into the political life of Lebanon. It is the unstable nature of Lebanon’s
constitution that has allowed this foreign-dominated organization to acquire a commanding
position in the government of the country, and exercise so much influence on
its affairs.

Hezbollah, aka
“The Party of God", was born about halfway through Lebanon's fifteen-year
civil war, which lasted from 1975 to 1990. Founded by religious clerics of the
Shi’ite persuasion, its ideology and doctrines deliberately mirrored those of
the Iranian ayatollahs. Towards the end of 1982 the nascent movement obtained
critical financial support and training from Iran’s
Revolutionary Guards. That connection
has been maintained ever since.

In its founding manifesto, issued in
1985, Hezbollah pledged loyalty to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, urged
the establishment of a Shi’ite Islamic regime in Lebanon, demanded the
expulsion of Western peace-keeping forces from Lebanese territory, and called for
the destruction of Israel. Its struggle against Israel, it declares, “will end
only when this entity is obliterated. We recognize no treaty with it, no
cease-fire, and no peace agreements, whether separate or consolidated."

From its foundation Hezbollah, following the
Iranian pattern, endorsed the use of terror as a means of achieving its
political goals. In October 1983 suicide attacks on the US embassy and Marine
Corps barracks in Beirut resulted in the deaths of 258 Americans. Over the 1980s and 1990s the group conducted
kidnappings and airplane hijackings, two bombings in Buenos Aires, several in
Paris and an attempted bombing in Bangkok. In 1996 it assisted in the Khobar
Towers attack in Saudi Arabia which killed 19 Americans – an operation that resulted in Hezbollah being added to the US State
Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations.

Syria’s civil
war has both strengthened and complicated the Iranian-Hezbollah
connection.

That the
Iranian regime is wholly in support of Syria’s President Bashar Assad, and
wholly opposed to the Sunni Islamic State (IS) that is seeking to overthrow
him, is not in doubt. Syria is a vital
link in Iran’s so-called “Shia Crescent” – the chain of allied
interests that supports its influence in the region, and is the counterweight
to IS’s ambition to establish a Sunni caliphate across the Middle East and
beyond.

Iran, however,
is engaged in protracted talks with world powers about its nuclear ambitions, during which it
hopes for a lifting of the sanctions that have been crippling its economy.The
US has ruled out any possibility of an easier deal on the nuclear issue in
exchange for Iran’s direct aid in combatting IS. Accordingly Iran will not allow itself to be seen to
collaborate with the “Great Satan” and join President Obama’s anti-IS
alliance. Back in December, it
vehemently denied that it had carried out airstrikes against IS targets in Iraq, despite Pentagon reports to the
contrary.

But there is
ample evidence that Iran, both directly and under cover of its puppet,
Hezbollah, has been providing massive support for the Assad regime in terms of men, material and money. Starting in 2012 Hezbollah fighters,
backed by Tehran and probably augmented by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, have been
directly engaged in combat. By December 2013 Iran
was thought to have approximately 10,000 operatives in Syria.In 2014 Iran stepped up support for
Assad and,
according to Syria’s Minister of Finance and Economy, "the Iranian
regime has given more than 15 billion dollars" to Syria.The
fact that Assad is still in power in Syria, and has made some important
strategic advances against IS, is undoubtedly due to the Iranian-Hezbollah
input.

Meanwhile
Hezbollah, by responding so enthusiastically to Iran’s demands, has been facing
difficulties at home in Lebanon.Although
its appeal within the Shi’te community remains strong, many have questioned the
rationality of involving thousands of fighters in a conflict which seems to run
counter to its declared purposes.Fighting as Iran’s proxy in Syria has no connection to Lebanon’s
internal problems, or to the eternal struggle against Israel.Moreover more than 600 young Lebanese have
lost their lives in the conflict, and despite Hezbollah’s generous financial
grants to the families who suffer bereavement, these deaths require some sort of justification.
Accordingly, Hezbollah Secretary-General, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, issues somewhat unconvincing statements from time to time reiterating that the
movement’s involvement in Syria represents a fight againstthe US, Israel, and Takfirism – the fundamentalist
Sunni movement which is anathema to Muslims who espouse the Shi’ite tradition.
Now Nasrallah has been relieved of the necessity to
make excuses to his own constituency. According to foreign media sources, Israel is responsible for a helicopter attack on January
18 in the Syrian province of Quneitra. The target was a military vehicle containing an
explosive combination of Iranian and Hezbollah officials. Eleven were killed including Jihad Mughniyeh, described
by Western intelligence sources as a “relentless
terrorist” plotting a series of cross-border terrorist attacks against Israel from Syria. Other fatal casualties included Muhammad
Issa, the head of Hezbollah’s operation in Syria and Iraq, and Iranian
Colonel Ali Reza al-Tabatabai, commander of the Radwan force, a special
operations unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon responsible for
planning attacks against Israel. But also killed was Iranian Revolutionary Guard General Muhammad Allahdadi. Now, killing an Iranian general is no small matter. According to Debkafile, an independent internet website specialising in strategic analysis,Israel subsequently used Western and Arab media outlets to “clarify” the
purpose of its air strike over the Golan, asserting that General Allahdadi and
his staff of five were not known to be traveling in the Hezbollah convoy, and
were not the target.

“We thought we were hitting an enemy field
unit that was on its way to carry out an attack on us at the frontier fence,” a
senior security official in Tel Aviv informed the media. “We went on the alert,
we spotted the vehicle, identified it as an enemy vehicle and took the shot.”

This semi-apology, according to Debkafile, was
intended to mollify Tehran, and was almost certainly made at the instigation of
Washington with one eye on the ongoing nuclear talks with Iran. The Obama
administration doubtless feared that the airstrike might snowball into a
full-scale military confrontation, leading to the breakdown of the
negotiations.

Will Iran accept Israel’s excuse for the death of a
senior general? Retaliation is
inevitable, emanating either directly from Iran, or more likely via its
Hezbollah satrap, but the degree and consequences of any reprisal hang in the balance.

Friday, 16 January 2015

Talking of cartoons, shortly after the huge and impressive Charlie
Hebdo rallies had taken place in Paris and across the Western world, a
telling cartoon appeared in the Jerusalem Post. A boy sits across the table fromhis
father.

“Why were cartoonists killed?” he
asks.

“Over freedom of speech,” says
his Dad.

“So, why were Jews killed too?”

“Over freedom of existence.”

And indeed, one has to ask what
connection could there be between the murderous attack on the cartoonists of Charlie
Hebdo and the customers in a kosher supermarket? The same question might have been asked
following the Mumbai massacre of 2008, in which a series of twelve coordinated
shooting and bombing attacks were carried out by Pakistani jihadists. Why was
the Nariman House Jewish community centre included among the hotel, hospital
and cinema targets?

The world is beginning to understand
that within the warped Islamist ideology, bitter resentment at Western
intervention into the affairs of Muslim states, fury at less than respectful
references to the Prophet, and hatred of Jews, Judaism and Israel are all
intermingled. In their philosophy, terrorist
action directed against any is equally justifiable . So to Amedy Coulibaly, acting to support the
terrorists who attacked and killed the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo, a
kosher supermarket seemed an entirely appropriate target to select. Just as, in the mindset of Pakistani
terrorists engaged in what was essentially an Islamist war against India, murdering
Jews was a basic component in the strategy.

Pakistan caller: Another thing: Israel has made a
request through diplomatic channels to save the hostages. If the hostages are
killed, it will spoil relations between India and Israel."

Mumbai terrorist:"So be it, God willing."

In
the event six Jewish lives were added to the 158 victims mowed down during those
four days of terror in November 2008.

Coulibaly,
too, having murdered four of his hostages, spoke on the phone and gave a TV
interview during the course of his siege of the kosher supermarket. Claiming he was sent by al-Qaeda in Yemen as
a defender of the Prophet, and that his attack had been synchronized with that by
the Kouachi brothers on the Charlie Hebdo offices, he offered no
justification for attacking a Jewish supermarket. Clearly he assumed that none
was called for.

“Sir – In all the comment about last week’s atrocities in Paris,
there has been much said about the rights and wrongs of insulting Muslim beliefs…
Extraordinarily, I have not heard or seen a single comment that
questions the motive of a killer who enters a Jewish supermarket and kills
random shoppers. It seems there is no need to explain. They were killed not
because they said or did things that were blasphemous or provocative, but
because they were probably Jews. Is the world so inured to this
that the question “Why?” is not even deemed necessary?

But the reason is
not difficult to discern. Islamists seek
to destroy Western freedoms throughout the world and substitute their own
version of a Muslim caliphate, and integral to their worldview is not only a total
intolerance for Jews, but a positive injunction to kill them whenever possible.
This hatred for Jews and
Israel has been brought to Europe as part of the baggage of radical Islamist
preachers. So far Western governments and organisations have failed to
recognize – or at least to acknowledge – two basic truths about all jihadists, whatever their hue: first,
that they are in earnest in their desire to pull down the institutions of
democracy and obliterate the Western way of life; and secondly that a hatred of
Jews, Judaism and Israel is locked into their ideology.

Joining the dots, it becomes abundantly
clear that for decades Israel – an island of Western democracy in a turbulent
Muslim ocean – has been in the vanguard of the anti-jihadist fight. The extremist Islamist entities of Hamas to
the east, Hezbollah to the north, and Iran to the west – all vehemently
anti-Semitic and dedicated to Israel’s destruction – have
been joined by jihadist factions in Syria and Iraq, led by Islamic State (or
“Daesh”, as Australia’s prime minister, Tony Abbott, proposes dubbing it, a term
it is said to loathe).

Now, in the light of the assault on the
French cartoonists and innocent supermarket shoppers, the Western world seems
to have committed itself to a determined effort to combat Islamist terror. Many
seem to have understood that this must also mean addressing the way Jew-hatred
has become acceptable in European society.
To repeat the mantra “Jews are the canary in civilization’s coalmine,” is
almost jejune, yet the aphorism remains as valid as the day it was coined. If Jews cannot live freely without fear of
attack in a democratic society, then everyone is at risk. The rising tide of anti-Semitism throughout Europe is a danger signal for Western democracy as a whole.

Perhaps some are beginning to appreciate the
connection between anti-Semitism and the distorted form of Islam promulgated by
jihadists of all hues. A hopeful
development is the news that on January 22 the United Nations General Assembly
is to hold its first-ever special meeting on “the global outbreak of
anti-Semitism.” The session was arranged following a petition
to the President of the General Assembly, Sam Kutesa, signed by 36 countries
and mounted on the initiative of the Israeli mission to the UN. Appropriately enough, the signatories include
all 28 members of the European Union – indicating that all acknowledge the recent worrying rise in anti-Semitic
activity within the countries of Europe.

Jihadist terrorism is by no means
exclusively anti-Semitic, but all anti-Semitic activity panders to the brutal,
inhumane and unacceptable world-view philosophy peddled by jihadists.The time has come for all people of goodwill,
whatever their religion or none, to take a determined stand against those who
believe that killing innocent people is an acceptable way to achieve their
objectives.Published in the Jerusalem Post on-line, 19 January 2015:http://www.jpost.com/Experts/Anti-Semitism-and-the-battle-against-Jihad-388228Published in the Eurasia Review, 16 January 2015:http://www.eurasiareview.com/16012015-anti-semitism-battle-jihad-oped/

Friday, 9 January 2015

There must be a limit to the number of immigrants,
whatever their status, that any sovereign state can accommodate before its
social cohesion and infrastructure begin to collapse under the strain. Acknowledgement of this political reality has
been slow to develop within Western governments, largely because it runs
counter to the generally liberal approach that most adopt towards legal
immigration. There has also been some reluctance to take action because of the
grey area that exists between immigrants and genuine refugees, to whom governments
have humanitarian obligations under international law.

There is another reason why most
governments have been reluctant to recognize the political hazards of
unrestricted immigration –
the fact that it is an issue taken up with enthusiasm by parties of the right,
often of the extreme right. Such parties
have enjoyed an upsurge in popularity in the past decade. Many frame their appeal by emphasizing illegal
immigration, which has soared to unprecedented levels. Sometimes they use other arguments. Just before Christmas a German group calling itself Pegida (Patriotic Europeans against the
Islamization of the West) drew a crowd of 17,500 people to a demonstration in
Dresden. Claiming to be neither racist
nor xenophobic, Pegida says it is simply calling for the preservation of the
country’s Judeo-Christian culture. It advocates a tightening of the immigration
laws, not only within Germany but in the EU generally.

In the US, the Tea Party regards illegal
immigrants, vast numbers of whom continue infiltrate into the country from
Mexico, as “a direct to threat to ... the rule
of law, free markets, private property, individual freedom, and fiscal
responsibility.” Estimates vary, but
some 15 to 20 million illegal immigrants are thought to be living in the
States, while the annual influx is about a million. In Britain,the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) has sprung to prominence in recent years. Its
leader, Nigel Farage, has said that the party is likely to go into the upcoming
general election promising a five-year ban on people coming to settle in
Britain while immigration policy is sorted out.

In
France the National Front’s policy is to reduce annual immigration from 200,000 to
10,000, to ban allillegal immigration and to end the current right of illegal
immigrants to remain in France if they have been in the country for a certain
time. No doubt the National Front will ensure that the Islamist attack in Paris
on the magazine Charlie Hebdo on January 7, 2015 feeds into the
forthcoming elections. In Norway there is the Progress
Party; in Switzerland, the Swiss
People’s Party. In Austria the Austrian Freedom Party has had representatives
in parliament since 1999. Similar examples can be found in Sweden,
Finland, Denmark, Holland, Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria and Greece, all of which
have extreme right parties that hold parliamentary representation.

In Australia it was the right-wing government that took the initiative
early in December to deal with a
backlog of 30,000 illegal “boat people”.
For them it tightened the immigration laws, while for genuine refugees it
introduced temporary visas which grant protection for up to three years but do
not give them the right to settle in Australia for good. New Zealand follows Australia’s tough
approach to illegal immigration. But
none of the countries combatting uncontrolled or illegal immigration had so far
declared that saturation point had been reached – until the
announcement early in January from Lebanon’s Interior
Minister, Nohad Machnouk: “There’s no capacity any more.”

Lebanon is hosting what is now the highest per capita number of refugees anywhere in the world. Since the beginning of the Syrian
conflict more than 1.5 million refugees have taken shelter in a country with a
population of 4.5 million. On January
5 Lebanon imposed new restrictions to stem the flood of refugees pouring in
from war-torn Syria. Travellers from Damascus will now need to make a formal application to
enter the country, and will have to apply for one of six types of entry permit
-- tourist, business, student, transit, medical or short stay. Each permit
requires specific documentation, such as hotel bookings, and for tourists possession
of $1,000, or for business people an invitation from a Lebanese company. There
is no provision for those seeking asylum, but according to Ron Redmond, a spokesman for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) in Lebanon: "The
government says that it will allow those extreme humanitarian cases access."

The unprecedented influx of
homeless, desperate people has overwhelmed Lebanon's water and electricity
supplies, pushed up rents and depressed the economy. Host communities across
the country have been stretched to breaking point. Villagers say they have been forced out of
their jobs by Syrians willing to work for lower wages. An increasing number of
attacks on the informal refugee settlements have been recorded. More than 45 Lebanese
towns and villages have imposed curfews, enforced by local, often violent
vigilantes, banning Syrian refugees from moving after dark.

In addition to the disruption
of ordinary life caused by accommodating hundreds of thousands of incomers,
Lebanon faces a social problem all its own. The Lebanese social order has
traditionally been a careful balance between the Sunni Muslim, Shia Muslim and
Christian elements in its society. Seats in the parliament are allocated
50-50 as between Muslims and Christians, while the President is always a Maronite
Christian, the Prime Minister a Sunni
Muslim, and the Speaker a Shia
Muslim. The Syrians fleeing into Lebanon are almost all Sunni Muslims, and
there are fears –
not least among Hezbollah and its supporters, who are of the Shi’te tradition – that if they were settled permanently, they would destabilise
the country's delicate sectarian balance.

Lebanon has
been pushed to the very limit of viability in absorbing incomers. It will no
doubt be used as an object lesson by governments, political parties and
organizations across the world with their own agendas for limiting immigration – and indeed there are lessons to be learned from Lebanon’s
experience. Although it has been the victim of events largely beyond its
control, its ordeal does demonstrate just how disruptive to a society an
uncontrolled and unplanned influx of newcomers can be. The answer surely lies
in government policies that encourage controlled and planned immigration likely
to benefit a society, offer humanitarian shelter to refugees fleeing from their
home countries in fear of their lives, and have zero tolerance for those
seeking to enter a state illegally, and for those profiting from this form of human
trafficking.Published in the Jerusalem Post on-line, 12 January 2015:http://www.jpost.com/Experts/Lebanon-reaches-the-limit-387490Published in the Eurasia Review, 10 January 2015:http://www.eurasiareview.com/09012015-lebanon-reaches-limit-oped/

Friday, 2 January 2015

Backin 1969Muammar al-Gaddafi,
universally known as Colonel Gaddafi, led a coup d'état in Libya and subsequently
ruled the country for forty-two years. He
was overthrown in October 2012, a victim of the so-called “Arab Spring” – the upsurge of the Arab masses, protesting against
the corrupt dictatorships under which most had lived for decades – and ever since Libya has been unable to achieve
stability.

Today
it is on the brink of a civil conflict no less unrestrained and bloody than that
in strife-ridden Syria. Like Syria, Libya is currently a battlefield over which
diverse armed groups, each intent on achieving its own ends, run amok. It, too, is plagued by Islamist extremists on
the rampage, intent on destroying every vestige of democratic rule and
substituting their own inhumane and soul-destroying version of Sharia law.

Having endured more than four decades of authoritarian
rule, even the moderates in Libya have little understanding of democracy, while
those aligned to Islamist interests positively reject it. As a result, Libya
has had five governments since its revolution. In June 2014 it held its second democratic
election since Gaddafi's overthrow. Islamist
political groups participated, but won only
about 30 of the 188 parliamentary seats. Consequently the poll was not only unsuccessful in achieving a stable
administration, but resulted in quite the reverse.For having failed to gain popular
support, an umbrella group of Islamist militias known as Libya Dawntook to the streets in August, and virtually captured the capital, Tripoli. What followed was a
breakdown of law, order and established government. The democratically elected – and internationally recognized – prime minister, Abdullah al-Thinni, and most of
his ministers and government officials fled the city with their families, and
Libya Dawn set up a rival Islamist administration led by Omar al-Hassi,
a hardline former al-Qaeda affiliate. As a result, Thinni has been
forced to run a rump state from a grey concrete hotel in the eastern city of
Tobruk, some 900 miles from the capital.

True
to Islamist form, since taking control in Tripoli the self-appointed Libya Dawn
government has torched the homes of dozens of rival politicians, cracked down
on critical media and, according to human rights groups and the UN. hounded
civil activists out of the country. Libya Dawn has also forced the central bank
to stop the flow of funds to the internationally recognized parliament,
alarming other governments who fear that Libya’s vast oil wealth could bolster
the resources of Islamist organisations.

Once the largest oil producer in Africa, Libya’s output – 1.59 million barrels per day at the end
of 2010 – is thought to havedropped to as low as 352,000 barrels per day since the current outbreak
of violence. Curiously, this particular cloud has a silver lining – at least as far as the oil producers
are concerned. Fear over the reliability of oil supplies from Libya could have
the positive effect of putting a floor under the tumbling world price of crude,
which has lost about 45 percent of its value since the middle of 2014. Whether energy consumers, filling their cars
or paying their gas bills, will benefit is less certain.

More to the point is evidence of a growing association
between Libya’s Islamist extremists and the Islamic State (IS), currently
wreaking havoc in Syria and Iraq. In the dying days of 2014 the commander of US
armed forces in Africa, General David Rodriguez, revealed that several hundred IS militants were
in training camps in eastern Libya, now under the control of Libya Dawn. IS loyalists have also been noted in the
coastal city of Derna and the adjacent Green Mountain range. In November the UN Security Council, learning
that the Derna branch of the Libyan Islamist groupAnsar al-Sharia had pledged allegiance
to IS, declared it a terrorist organisation.

“Training
camps are seen and heard by everybody,” said Adel al-Faydi, a tribal leader from a town near Derna.
“They include large numbers from many nationalities who reached Libya by sea.
Now they are not hiding, they are out and about in the city.” He said that IS fighters and their jihadi
allies recently gave Libyan tribal leaders a three-day ultimatum to withdraw
their support to the government’s operations, “otherwise they'll assassinate
them. That’s why we expect the violence to escalatein the coming days.”

Just
like the IS in Iraq and Syria, Libya Dawn and its affiliates are intent on
establishing their own regime across the country. The parallels are chilling. So far Libya’s three main cities – Tripoli,
Misrata and Benghazi –
have fallen into their hands. Libya Dawn
“want their own version of what an Islamic state should look like,” said Mohamed Eljarh, a Libyan commentator, quoting the words of Sadegh
al-Gheriani, Libya’s grand mufti, an outspoken supporter of the Islamist
militias, who has issued edicts demanding gender segregation and barring women
from marrying foreigners.

In a
classic political manoeuvre,Mohamed Zarroq, a Benghazi-based Islamist and co-founder of the Libyan
branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, claims: “People support Libya Dawn because
they believe in what they are doing, They are cleansing the security forces of
Gaddafi loyalists.”

Who, except for the
crippled government holed up in Tobruk, is opposing these destructive Islamists?Only a loose alliance going under the generic
title of the Dignity Movement. composed of liberal political factions, militias
from the western city of Zintan and armed forces loyal to General Haftar. They
are fighting what might be described as a rearguard action.Just like the democratic forces opposing IS
in Syria and Iraq, they need all the help they can muster, both political and
military.Let us hope it will be
forthcoming.Published in the Jerusalem Post on-line, 5 January 2015:http://www.jpost.com/Experts/Libya-and-the-anti-Islamist-struggle-386701Published in the Eurasia Review, 3 January 2015:http://www.eurasiareview.com/03012015-libya-anti-islamist-struggle-oped/

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About Me

I have been commenting on the Middle East scene for over thirty years. I am Middle East correspondent for the on-line journal Eurasia Review, and my articles also appear regularly in the Jerusalem Post, the MPC Journal and elsewhere. Born in London, I was educated at Owen's School and am a graduate of St Edmund Hall, Oxford. A veteran radio and audio dramatist and abridger, I am a past chairman of the Society of Authors’ Broadcasting Committee and the Contributors’ Committee of the Audiobook Publishing Association. In the Queen’s Birthday Honours in 2006 I was awarded the MBE for services to broadcasting and drama. My latest book is “The Chaos in the Middle East, 2014-2016”. My other books include “One Man’s Israel”, “One Year in the History of Israel and Palestine” and “The Search for Détente: 2012-2014”.
For a fuller, more personal history, please see the “Biography” page on my website at: www.nevilleteller.co.uk